Friday, February 12, 2010

Mobile analytics company Flurry used its January data to look at the top application categories for iPhone and Android device owners. Parallels between the two types of smartphone users are very similar: social networking apps are by far the most frequently used category of apps.

For Flurry’s January report, the company decided to dissect application usage based on the following categories: games, entertainment, social networking, and news and lifestyle.

On both iPhone and Android phones, social networking apps were used most frequently — about 20 times per month — with news coming in a distant second. In fact, in terms of frequency alone, we’re using social networking apps at double the rate we’re using news applications, and four times the rate we’re firing up mobile games. Based on Flurry data, it also appears that the frequency at which we use entertainment, games and lifestyle apps in totality still doesn’t rival how frequently we use social networking apps each month.

It’s interesting to note, however, that in terms of actual session length — duration of individual application usage — smartphone users split larger chunks of their time between news, games and social networking respectively, with users devoting nearly 10 minutes on average to news applications. What it boils down to is that we use social networking apps most frequently, but spend longer periods of time consuming information in news applications.

These findings are especially striking and essentially confirm that social media has become integrated into our lives, so much so that we’re using our smartphones to stay connected while we’re away from our computers. In fact, social media has become more entertaining than entertainment itself.